Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

The scientist who first named the actual element settled on the name aluminum, which matches the oxide to the elemental name, alumina -> aluminum, as is consistent with other oxides. It is not incorrect, and predates the -ium use.

It's not that we're "misspelling" it; it's that we had a spelling reformer by the name of Noah Webster whose dictionary has been the standard of American English for nearly 200 years.

Given that England has dramatically different ways to pronounce words, and throwing in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales mixes things up even more, I'd expect there to be a more enlightened understanding that distance and time results in different, but by no means incorrect, dialects.

You and everybody else is making jokes but did you forget we thought "radiation is your friend" and even looked at using nukes to make harbors in the 50s and in the 40s nearly every boat and a lot of the tanks used asbestos "for the safety of the men" because of its fireproof qualities?

I'll never forget a lecture I saw by Neil Tyson where he said "All great scientists work at the edge of ignorance" and he's right, if its one thing that science has taught us is that we REALLY don't know as much about how everything works as we THINK we do. Now is this happening? I do not know which is why i look forward to his findings, it would explain why we seem to have a lot more cases of cancer, at least from what I've seen. Maybe some people are more sensitive to this than others, like how some people can smoke all their lives and never get cancer while somebody else smokes 5 years and gets it, who knows? All I DO know is if it turns out to be true it wouldn't surprise me, anymore than it surprises me we knew so little about radiation and asbestos back in the day. We still have so much to learn about how everything works, especially hard to study things like lightning.

Did you know that certain preservatives when mixed basically creates benzene, which is a seriously nasty cancer causing agent? Do YOU know which combos to avoid?

Just avoid anything that contains the word "benzoate". Any of those substances mixed with any number of acids can produce benzene. Easier to just avoid sodium/potassium benzoate entirely than to worry about combinations.

Hate to break it to you all but lots of recent planes are composed of significant amounts of carbon composites.... Not as much as our favorite problem child, the 787, but enough to change the radiation penetration behavior of the fuselage.

That said, neither 1/4 inch of aluminum or composite is going to do much to a high energy gamma ray.

Gamma rays are stopped by 1/4 inches of aluminum? I can see it messing with radio waves, but gamma radiation? Requiring all passenger planes to include a radiation dosimeter for a while (include it with the black box recorder) and we would have a practical answer.

From the article:thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/radiation3.htm [howstuffworks.com]:Beta particles can be stopped or reduced by a layer of clothing or a substance like aluminum.... Gamma rays often accompany alpha and beta particles. Unlike alpha and beta particles, they are extremely penetrating. In fact, several inches of lead or even a few feet of concrete are required to stop gamma rays.... X-rays... aren't quite as penetrating as gamma rays, and just a few millimeters of lead can stop them

On top of that, the aluminum body of an airplane has *lots* of holes in it (windows, control avionics, etc).

While it is true that shielding from Gamma rays on an airplane is basically impractical, that isn't a realistic measurement of how "dangerous" it is. "X feet of lead" is what it takes to block it. What we really need to know is how much the human body absorbs. A body doesn't block gamma rays, and rays not absorbed by the body pass right through doing nothing.

So really, the question becomes how much is absorbed on pass-through and what the rays stopped in the human body do there.

If this were actually the case then I can think you would be seeing a disproportionate number of pilots and flight attendants getting cancer. Anyways it's something that is hopefully already being considered anyways as it's a fact that flying at higher altitudes increases your exposure to radiation anyways because of the lack of shielding from the atmosphere.

Also concord planes*(at least some) have radiation dosimeters any spikes caused by dark lightning must either be extremely rare or are not being announced by people who operate the sensors on planes.

However, because there’s only about one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes and because pilots take great pains to avoid thunderstorms, Dwyer says, the risk of injury is quite limited. No one knows for sure if anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.

It's an interesting claim and I look forward to hearing more about it but there is effectively no risk to people flying being suggested. Unfortunately/. has decided to focus on the non-existent risk rather than the rather interesting properties of 'dark lightning' and what study of it could help us to understand.

Not so fast, mister cynic. First the article says "one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes" and then shortly afterward "thunderstorms produce about a billion or so lightning bolts annually".

So that's one million "dark lightning" incidents every year, and how many global aircraft flights? Avoidance of thunderstorms or not, odds are it's been happening and we didn't know to look for symptoms until now.

Most cancers from cigarettes are I believe caused because the layer of tar prevents the body from repairing itself normally. After a couple of years off them the tar and other negative effects should have dispersed for the most part.

What I don't get about this research is why they don't just stick a few geiger counters and recorders on planes and fly them near thunderstorms, surely that would be the best way to test the theory? Also, is there any chance this could lead to the return of zeppelins, because th

Not to mention that any modern dirigible would use Helium for a lift gas rather than Hydrogen, and not be coated wit rocket fuel.The Hindenburg was designed for Helium, but we didb't want to give/sell them any. The USA had a monopoly at that time.

Not to mention that any modern dirigible would use Helium for a lift gas rather than Hydrogen, and not be coated wit rocket fuel.

Disagree and agree, respectively. Hydrogen is everywhere and Helium is running short and getting more expensive. New hydrogen barriers are developed all the time, and Helium requires special barriers as well.

I recently had an idea which would make for some nice scenes in anime or something; homes that convert into dirigibles so they can be moved. The weather only plays along for a couple months a year, of course. I'm imagining a big structured net bag full of separate hydrogen bags, connected to a compresso

Hydrogen is everywhere and Helium is running short and getting more expensive. New hydrogen barriers are developed all the time, and Helium requires special barriers as well.

Heh. Your point is that a careful assessment of modern technical
capabilities would conclude that hydrogen-filled lifting bodies
can be built and operated relatively safely, and have technical
and economic advantages, and therefore will be used.

Also, I was under the impression that there was an unexplained increase in the number of cancer incidents in the last several decades. Clearly it's a long-shot but it does seem like it's worth investigating...

Between 2000 and 2009, overall cancer incidence rates decreased by 0.6 percent per year among men, were stable among women, and increased by 0.6 percent per year among children (ages 0 to 14 years). During that time period, incidence rates among men decreased for five of the 17 most common cancers (prostate, lung, colon and rectum, stomach, and larynx) and increased for six others (kidney, pancreas, liver, thyroid, melanoma of the skin, and myeloma). Among women, incidence rates decreased for seven of the 18 most common cancers (lung, colon and rectum, bladder, cervix, oral cavity and pharynx, ovary, and stomach), and increased for seven others (thyroid, melanoma of the skin, kidney, pancreas, leukemia, liver, and uterus). Incidence rates were stable for the other top 17 cancers, including breast cancer in women and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in men and women.

A billion lightning bolts really doesn't tell us very much and I'd be disinclined to just pretend that 'dark lightning' behaves in the same manner; however if it was, and if it did, then the odds of being hit by lightning ~1/1,000,000, thus odds of 'dark lightning' hitting you is ~1/1,000,000,000. If you're making any kind of decision based on a 1 in 1 billion chance of something happening to you each year then you are wasting your time.

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

I wasn't giving it undue weight; I know it's more likely to be maimed some other way. It just seemed to me to have non-zero probability, not non-existent.

Regardless whether you liked the article's tone and focus or not, it's obvious we'll be reading more about it later, including the physics behind it. Since we already have obsessed storm and tornado chasers, I predict that some rich dudes with their own private planes will outfit them with gear and start flying them right into lightning storms just to se

So that's one million "dark lightning" incidents every year, and how many global aircraft flights? Avoidance of thunderstorms or not, odds are it's been happening and we didn't know to look for symptoms until now.

I think it'd be interesting to find out if whole plane-loads of cancer patients could be traced back to individual flights — and to consider that this phenomenon could have been occurring since the beginning of the airline industry.

"So that's one million "dark lightning" incidents every year, and how many global aircraft flights? Avoidance of thunderstorms or not, odds are it's been happening and we didn't know to look for symptoms until now."

You can't just dismiss avoidance of thunder storms, have a look at this map:

Should be really easy to study - are aircrew more likely to suffer the ill effects of ionizing radiation, whatever those are.

It would be the sort of thing that an established Airline and staff (or air force) would probably already have noticed, particularly any that fly through and around the intense storms in the tropics. The fact that they haven't leads me to think that this may be a non-story.

It is plenty informative if you read the article: "The study, published in the Lancet, examined Danish male jet cockpit crew flying more than 5,000 hours." The contention was that any effect of 'dark lightning' radiation should already be apparent in studies of airline crews. The study referenced by the article is full of valid data even if they didn't know about dark lightning back then.

It's been studied. Airline pilots get more melanoma than the rest of us, probably from hanging out on nice beaches too much. They don't get any of the other cancers you'd predict from large bursts of x-rays or gamma rays any more than anybody else.

Should be really easy to study - are aircrew more likely to suffer the ill effects of ionizing radiation, whatever those are.

It would be the sort of thing that an established Airline and staff (or air force) would probably already have noticed, particularly any that fly through and around the intense storms in the tropics. The fact that they haven't leads me to think that this may be a non-story.

I have an uncle who used to drop nuclear bombs for the USAF when they were doing all those open bomb tests in Nevada, the Bikini islands, and what not. According to him, every survivng man in his unit has had to have the major arteries in their legs some 30-40 years after they did those bomb tests.

It being common knowledge that flying is subject to higher than normal radiation levels, and there is therefore a worry about crews, I had assumed that aircraft carried dosimeters so that crew members' total personal doses were monitored. No? If so, then this would not be a theory - it could be checked from the monitoring.

If they do not carry dosimeters, why not? Ground level radiation workers have to by law. I am a nuclear engineer and do so on visits to plant - yet my total life dose over some years of this is tiny, less than typical aircrew would have I believe.

Maybe there is a lot of money in owning bankrupt airlines. In all seriousness we do see endless parades of airlines coming and going out of business. If they are such an awful monetary risk would we really see them cropping up? One way or another airlines make money whether the books and "official" paper work indicates it or not. It is rather like a valley full of farmers who know

There is a difference between the company making money and the executives getting salary + options. See what happened to Nortel in Canada, company was bled dry to the point of no money left in the disability and pension funds, and executives were giving themselves $200 million bonuses. When there is that much money to suck out of a company, there are plenty of people who see it as viable.

There are dosimeters on board. I have completed several radiation safety courses during my work and radiation levels for airline crew are monitored and tracked just like they are for workers in nuclear and other research fields. Frequent fliers are not monitored and tracked. I work at CERN and I know exactly how much ionizing and neutron dose I receive during my work, but I also have to travel between my home at Fermilab and CERN and I have no idea how much dose I receive on my trans-Atlantic flights. The pilot of the plane is monitored and his dose is tracked. That pilot should also have access to his personal dose, but I don't know what the level of transparency is in the airline industry. So if there were a significant likelihood, the data is there.

Speaking from a physics point of view, a huge acceleration is need to produce x-ray and gamma rays. And they aren't hard to detect. It would seem that a balloon experiment flying some CsI or other crystals in some thunderstorms would quickly detect this phenomena even if it is 1/1000 or even 1/10000.

And what about the numbers of photon? (Sorry, not the correct term, but I think you see what you mean. I'm an MD and currently too lazy to dig the correct terminology).

I mean, yes X-Rays can be highly energetic and Gamma even more so. But I'm under the impression that the higher the energy, the lesser the amount of produced rays.Ultimately, we might find real proof that indeed very high energetic Gamma rays might be produced occasionally, but practical

"There are dosimeters on board. I have completed several radiation safety courses during my work and radiation levels for airline crew are monitored and tracked just like they are for workers in nuclear and other research fields."

People have been flying for many decades. Epidemiologically, there is a significant increase among airline pilots only of melanoma and breast cancer, not of other cancer types. That's not consistent with occasional large bursts of x-ray and gamma radiation (it may be due to leisure activities).

One study with a significant result isn't sufficient to demonstrate an effect. Lots of other studies have seen no effect on leukemia. The only significant increase seems to be for melanoma (and breast cancer in women).

Airlines should be subject to the same regulations as nuclear power. All planes should have a few meters of lean and concrete shielding to protect the passengers. Anything that saves one childs life should be done.

Radiation damage isn't cumulative. If it were, you would see greater incidences of cancer in areas with higher naturally occurring background radiation, or in workers with greater exposure. Unless you overwhelm your body's repair mechanisms, the damage is essentially harmless and repair is a natural part of everyday life. Low levels of radiation are much less dangerous than ordinary carcinogens and particulate that we are dumping into our environment by the billions of tons every year.

Granted, this so-called dark lightning may exceed safe levels over short periods of time. Then again, if you are struck by lightning, you will also probably exceed a maximum safe number of electrons transiting through your body. This would appear to be an extremely rare, if not entirely imaginary problem. To my knowledge, there have't been any planefuls of people who have died of acute radiation exposure.

Radiation damage isn't cumulative. If it were, you would see greater incidences of cancer You are committing the logical fallacy of asserting the consequent, without a shred of proof for anything you say. Moreover, death is not the only possible result of radiation exposure.

Radation dammage comes in two forms. Massive doses can cause acute dammage; 'radiation poisoning' and kill you quickly.Radiation exposure can also trigger cancers at any dose.Nuclear regulatory agencies use the "linear, no threshold" model for guaging radiation exposure risk. Essentialy, any ionizing radiation absorbed by your body has a chance of triggering a cancer. The more exposure you have, the more chances you have.

Think of it this way: every unit of radiation exposure is like a cancer lottery tic

The "sensor" referred to in the article appears to be the main instrument on board the Fermi spacecraft: the not very imaginatively named Large Area Telescope,or LAT. This was developed by a very large international team, including NASA and the DoE in the US. However, Dwyer, as far as I know, was nota member of this large team. (And I don't think the article or Dwyer actually claim this.)The data obtained from the LAT are made public as soon as possible, usually within much less than 24 hours,after being ob

However, because there’s only about one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes and because pilots take great pains to avoid thunderstorms, Dwyer says, the risk of injury is quite limited. No one knows for sure if anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.

Most commercial aircraft cannot fly high enough to fly above CB clouds, especially in the tropics where the are at their most intense and where the tropopause is higher. The only avoidance route is to fly around them. Simply put, thunderstorms are too high to fly over them. On the other hand, normal rain showers can be easily avoided by flying over them.

Not necessarily. Airliners in which I have flown commonly go no higher than 36,000 feet - occasionally perhaps 40,000 feet. The tops of thunderstorms often reach 55,000 feet and can be even higher. One extreme case reached about 70,000 feet. Moreover, it is necessary to fly well above the tops of the visible clouds, as bad things can happen up to a mile higher. Check out, for instance, http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/152684/ [airliners.net]

I thought flight levels were odd-only starting at and above FL290 — or do the airliners in which you fly not adhere to flight levels?

Not since 2005 in the U.S. - under a program called Reduced Vertical Separation Minima, the 2000-foot separations apply at FL410 and above. Below that, it's based on heading (or actually ground track); 0-179 will be assigned odd FLs; 180-359 get assigned even FLs.

thats just the thundercell itself, essentially the motor that drives the rest of the storm system. the rest of the storm system will still produce rain and lightning without rising higher. the thundercell is essentially a self-reinforcing vortex (though vortex isnt really the right word) that builds and builds on itself, and provides the energy to the rest of the storm.

Pilots (I am one) live longer because of the strict medical requirements imposed upon them, and the fact that the moment a pilot shows any sign of sickness, especially with respect to the most common health problems in the US (Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Hypertension), they are grounded and do not get included in the long-term studies of pilot lifespan.

The studies of pilot lifetime have the unfortunate bias of the FAA weeding the unhealthy from the sample group long before the "bad" samples can be included